A Lot Hasn't Changed Since '79

What a day. First Ken Layne gets back in front of the keyboard, now David Warren has a new column. Warren reports on the situation in Iran, and finds lots of facts our usual sources won't tell us:

In a further sign that the regime was losing its grip, it then confined its police to barracks in Isfahan, as it had done the previous day in Tehran -- doubting their loyalty. Instead they sent foreign thugs with paramilitary training, chiefly Palestinian and Iraqi Arabs, and Uzbeks and Tadzhiks from Afghanistan, to beat the demonstrators down. It was a desperate measure -- an implicit acknowledgement that the whole Persian people have now sided with the opposition.

To understand how this could have happened, it is important to realize that almost two-thirds of the Iranian population was not yet born in 1979, when the Shah fell and Ayatollah Khomeini brought the world's first Islamist, terrorist regime to power. And most of his cronies, still in power, are now quite old. Iran's formerly very high birthrate (it has since plummeted) created the mother of all generation gaps. To the students in universities, and other young people coming of age in a time of Internet and satellite TV, the ayatollahs have nothing to say. Their parents, too, are sick to death of living under the Shia version of Islamist tyranny; but while their parents were cowed into submission, the kids refuse to sit still.

I can't say this enough, kids: Do not interfere in Iran. A generation under the mullahs has been plenty for the Middle East's most civilized civilization. If we stick our noses in now, we can only hurt matters. If need be, we can help during the revolution -- and certainly after. And the New Iran will help us, too.

NOTE: The only people who will be surprised by the next Iranian Revolution will be the editors of the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc., and those who rely on them for their "news." And why do I feel it was no different in 1979?